Drinking Coffee

Thank you, dear ones, for the sympathy on the last post, both here and on Instagram. I’m happily out the other side of disaster today, or at least out the other side of spectacular disaster and back to the regular Christmas kind, which suddenly seems like no big deal.

When last we saw our heroine, she was walking down over the stairs in her underpants, through what was practically a wading pool of paint, trying to figure out where you even start with something like that. As I tracked paint inevitably through the house, making things worse by the second, I came up with a plan. I am ridiculously proud of this. Considering how big that disaster was, I came back from the edge really, really quickly. There was four minutes of violent swearing, three minutes of crying, and then… then I got it together.  Step one, I scraped off as much of the paint as I could, and got the clothing, coats, etc that had been spattered into the wash. (This did not work, but it turns out that rubbing alcohol removes paint – sort of, so there were hours of scrubbing later, but I managed to rescue my ski jacket and Joe’s sweater. My jeans and the handknit socks I was wearing didn’t make it.) I used a piece of cardboard to get what I could off the stairs, and then wiped off anything else I could.  Then I left it to dry.

The next morning, things still looked pretty bad, but at least I knew where to go with it.  I painted one side of the stairs –

and then 24 hours later, the other, so that I could still go up and down them, while I tried to do all the other million things I do before the gingerbread party. (Like make Gingerbread.) In between I wrapped presents, cooked for 50, finished the cleaning and scrubbed clothing with rubbing alcohol and a toothbrush.  The day of the party, the stairs looked like this.

We still have to repaint – they’ve only got one coat on them and look terrible in real life, and while I repainted the trim and touched up the walls, that needs proper handling too. All I really managed to do was take it from shocking to bad, and that’s enough for this time of year, I think, especially since it’s only light for a few hours a day, and the rest of the time… well, everything looks better by candlelight.

In the meantime, the Christmas crafting rolled to a virtual stop. I got a little bit done each day, but the morning of the party the pile looked like this-

I’m farther on one of the socks, the sweater is the same,  I fixed the mittens but have two pairs to go… I’d show you what it looked like after the party, but I let this happen to the table.

I spent yesterday chipping all that icing off of every surface of the house (briefly astonished that there was even icing on the stairs, haven’t they been through enough?) and last night I packed up to go. Joe and I are on a plane as I write this, about to take off for BC. We’ll visit friends and family for a few days, and then head back home. The next few days are prime knitting days, and I have brought with me all of the stuff I need to finish two pairs of socks, begin and finish two pairs of mittens, and knit the sleeves and yoke of a small sweater. In my heart, I believe that in four days, I am coming home with all of this done, ready to apply myself to the few remaining Christmas tasks.*

This is, of course, not possible – not really. In reality, it’s going to be a miracle if I finish any of those things now that I’ve spent days mopping up paint, but hope springs eternal, and there is a long flight in my future, and that makes this amount of knitting a terrible and tantalizing thing. It makes it almost possible, and that… that I can’t give up on.

*Through the miracle of caffeine, the shopping and wrapping is all done. I have no idea how I managed it.